The question https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/306323/type-straight-quotes-when-smart-quotes-is-turned-on answers this quite well for macOS, but the solution (using a text replacement with the straight quote as the replacement phrase) does not appear to work in iOS: I like to use the typographically correct smart quotes, but when I need to edit text in a markup or programming language, it’s frequently the case that I need to enter straight single and double quotes. These text replacements pictured (and more such as exactly the ones mentioned in the macOS solution above) don’t get replaced at all if they contain quotes (either straight or curly) in the shortcut. On the other hand, if I use a text replacement like the ^^s at the bottom here: I get a ‘ character, even though the replacement’s phrase is the ' character. (Note that the examples above that one also beginning with double-carets, such as ^^1 → ¹, ^^9 → ⁹, etc., work just fine—I used them in this sentence to type those superscript digits.) I’m looking for a way to set a global hotkey to toggle smart quotes, a macro to insert a single or double straight quote, or anything easier than my current two methods: 1. Go to Settings → Keyboard and toggle the smart quotes, type the straight quote, and go back to Settings → Keyboard and toggle them back (this is what I do when I need to only type straight quotes for a period of time); or 2. Find a single quote or double quote somewhere and copy/paste it. (This is what I do when I must mix the two in ongoing text editing.) Both are painful. I’d appreciate any trick to make it less so!

I need help with the following Apple Numbers REGEX.EXTRACT formula that doesn’t return the word before a dot. Below are the text form of the arguments passed to the formula and the formula itself as well as a screenshot.

Pattern: \b\w+\b(?=\.)
String: 123. xpto.
Formula: REGEX.EXTRACT(“123. xpto.”, \b\w+\b(?=\.),1)

I'm currently using Pages to write a rather long essay and have run into an annoying problem I can't seem to find the answer to. I have included a bibliography in my document and have referenced the bibliography elsewhere in the essay with ` where 1` is the book number I am referencing. Here is an example sentence: > Here we see , "the quick brown fox", jumps over the "Lazy dog". My intention is to format the sentence like this: > Here we see , "the quick brown fox" , jumps over the "Lazy dog". Whilst I understand you can select the text, click Format, Font, Baseline and select Superscript; this would take an extremely long time to do as there are around 100 places where I would need to do this. Is there a way to find and replace a string, e.g. with , throughout the whole document?

I have just upgraded my Mac to macOS 14 Sonoma, and noticed a little icon appearing in text if I wait long enough. The icon looks like this: with the colour depending on the application. It only appears after a while (about 10 minutes), and disappears when the text loses focus. This is what it looks like in Notepad: I’ve also noticed a caps lock icon, but that’s pretty clear. So, what is it?

I'm not seeing an option to choose plain text encoding (.TXT extension) when saving a file in TextEdit.app in macOS. My documents seem to all be rtf - rich text format. How can I change this?

Given a text with a link inside:  Prior to iOS 13, i could long press a word that was not part of the URL to select the word, then drag the finger over a word in the URL to select only that word of the URL, without opening the URL. In iOS 13 this is not possible anymore. When dragging the selection of a single word, the selection gets extended with additional words. How can I select a single word in a URL to copy the word without opening the URL?

iOS 14 - I stopped receiving text notifications while on a phone call. How do I get the text notifications back?

I just upgraded to a 4K monitor. I'm trying to get the text size to be larger and the menu larger via the "Accessibility > Display" Text size setting. No matter what size I set it to, nothing changes even with a reboot. The text is still too small. I could set the display size down of course but I don't want to do that for all the pixels, just text. From what I've read, there's no equivalent in MacOS to the text rendering tweaking that Windows or even Linux allow, or at least not in the same way of working where the font rendering system itself could be controlled. I just fiigure that the Retina Display concept people would have a way to do what seems to me a pretty obvious display mode.

I have a contact with whom I share text messages from two different phone numbers. How can I distinguish the two text conversations? Right now, it labels them identically with Full Name at the top, and first name beneath. iPhone 6 running ios 10.

I am new to modern Macs. I connected my PG49WCD OLED monitor to a M4 Mac mini via HDMI. I think the monitor has an unusual subpixel layout. All text is rendered in a very distracting way that looks oversharpened with a strange color halo appearance. I tried playing with font smoothing adjuster and different resolutions, but I didn't find a satisfying solution. The same monitor has good text rendering with Linux and Windows (using different machines). Is there anything I'm missing? I'm attaching a picture, but it's hard to see, you can see the shimmery halo around that dark icon though.

I can use the zoom buttons (AA) in Safari 17's toolbar to increase the size of every element on a page. I can also hold alt/option to increase only the page's text size in the View menu (called the "Content" menu in my locale). I really like the toolbar buttons (I use them in both Safari and Firefox), and I really like zooming text only so as not to introduce horizontal scrollbars on narrow displays, but I can't seem to use the toolbar buttons with the alt/option modifier to get the same effect as in the menu. **Is there a way to adjust text size from Safari's toolbar?** If I remember correctly, in Firefox, for comparison, there is a permanent option to "Zoom text only" which solves it there.

For instance, ▎(Left One Quarter Block, [U+258E](https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+258E)) can be shown in macOS but not 🮇 (Right One Quarter Block, [U+1FB87](https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1FB87)) , not even in the Character Viewer, or on native apps like Finder & Spotlight. That character was introduced in Unicode 13 in 2020. Any ideas to show *all* newer unicode characters, perhaps even patching fonts to do so.

I have multiple AppleTVs. I would like to have a slideshow running photos of the past year's adventures and display the location at the bottom left and the date taken at the bottom right corner of each image. Yes, this simple feature should be something that Apple's own slide shows and AppleTV could do on their own without my intervention - but Apple has dropped the ball on much of their software.... I digress. I have written a Shortcut to take a folder of my favorite photos exported from Photos (which contains the necessary EXIF data), overlay the necessary info, and then save each as a new image in a new folder. I've managed to get this to work fine - with one exception. The test folder has 10 images in it, whereas, in the real world, the actual folder will hold ~1000 images. The Shortcut runs and pauses, asking me to click on each image in the folder via a thumbnail the shortcut displays; after I've clicked 10 times, the processed images all appear in my target folder, and the text overlays looks great. How do I edit the Shortcut, or covert it to an automation, or any other reasonable approach so that I can just point it to a folder of 2000 photos and have it do its thing without bothering me? I fear this might be a limitation of the "Overlay text" action in Shortcuts, but I am not sure. Below is a copy of the Shortcut. Edit: Here is link to the Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/326e58e576b74578bb7d954693301e77

I know how to extract text from images using preview.app, however I would like to use this feature from terminal to extract all the text from a bunch of images. I tried this using this method to apply same operation to multiple images but it doesn't work (it select text from only one image at time). I also tried converting the images into one pdf, but the text selection doesn't work anymore. I found no macOS apps or utilities I could use for extract the text from my image(s) from terminal. Right now I used the proprietary Apple's text recognition machine learning new capabilities (on macOS and iOS , here it's explained how to use their Vision framework). Any idea?

I prefer to text dates and times of events containing certain word within date range. A shortcut called “Calendar to PDFs” didn’t work entirely because it listed only first month of date range. ![Screenshot of “Calendar to PDFs” ][1] Shortcut that didn’t work entirely because it listed only first month of date range.

I am trying to copy and paste the dimensions of this box on the USPS website in Safari. For some mysterious reason, I am unable to do so. **Is there a way to select this text without changing browsers?**

I've been looking for an answer to this question for a while, so I'm guessing this can only be solved with a console command. What I want to do is disable 'Text Replacement' everywhere on my Mac. The trick is, I have a library of text replacements that I use on my iPhone (like ill > I'll), and apparently it's synced to my iCloud account. As a result, if I make changes in one place it affects all of my devices everywhere - making the easy solution of "delete all of the text substitutions from your substitution library" is unavailable. The text replacement I'm referring to specifically is the option you can disable by right-clicking on any text input area, then selecting 'Substitutions < Text Replacement' (see image). I know you can disable this one field at a time by right-clicking fields and unchecking 'Text Replacement', but it is enabled by default for every individual input on every field for every application (including the entire internet and my browser's search/address bar), and it periodically gets re-enabled on some inputs. I've already disabled 'Correct Spelling Automatically' from my system text options. (see image) And still I have to disable 'Text Replacement' on every field or it will try to correct my typing with entries in that dictionary. I use iCloud tabs, handoff, and a number of Apple's other "Better Together" features (and I don't want to lose the ability to track my devices with 'Find my [device]'), so I don't want to disassociate my iCloud account from my computer or devices, but I'd be really happy if I never had to disable 'Text Replacement' on an input field again. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated! **EDIT:** I've found https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/217387/172938 and https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/121553/172938 , both of which have some console references: defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled -bool true from the first link (for enabling 'Text Replacement' in Safari). defaults delete -g NSUserDictionaryReplacementItems from the second link (for deleting the User Dictionary *as seen in my second image*). Both pertain to my issue tangentially, but each to the opposite effect I'm looking for.

Doing *Quick Look* on .txt files is very convenient (select in *Finder* and press space). Is there a way to enable Quick Look for other text files which don't have the .txt extension (e.g., .strings files)?

I just "upgraded" to Sonoma, and discovered it no longer handles postscript files. I have a simple script to format text files:

ENSCRIPT="--no-header --margins=36:36:36:36 --font=Courier12 --word-wrap --media=Letter"
export ENSCRIPT
/opt/local/bin/enscript -p - $1 | /usr/bin/lpr

that no longer works as a result and I was wondering if anyone knew of alternatives?

There are a few similar questions regarding "clipboard managers" but nothing that quite suits my needs. I often end up with an unformatted list of text that needs entering into various form fields. I'm looking for a utility that makes the clipboard act like a FIFO queue using a pre-defined text file of this nature. Say I have a text file with 30 names Adam Alice ... Will Zara I'd like to be able to paste this list into the clipboard manager. I'd then switch to the form, click the first box, press a hotkey and the first item would be "popped" from the list and pasted into the box. I'd then click the second box, press the hotkey again and the next name would be popped and pasted. As a bonus, it would also be cool if I could do the reverse: click an item, press a hotkey and it's appended to a text file (or a list that can be easily exported as an unformatted text file). I've seen that lots of these other tools can build a list within the app itself, but I really need the output to be in a text file to use for other purposes.